Well, here’s a fun announcement. PandoDaily is very pleased to welcome a new special contributor: Jason Calacanis. Jason will be writing a regular (every couple of weeks) column, offering advice to a company that’s at a crossroads.

Anyone who has attended Jason’s Launch conference, or read his blog or watched an episode of This Week In Startups will know exactly why we were so keen to add Jason’s voice to the site. He’s one of the most consistently entertaining (and, it has to be said, generous) voices in the tech ecosystem. The mentorship he gives at Launch — and before that, at TechCrunch 50 — has probably added countless millions of dollars of value to the companies involved, not to mention those in the audience.

This fact is made only slightly ironic by the varying fortunes of Jason’s own startups: Weblogs Inc sold for $30ish million to AOL, the LAUNCH festival is well attended but Mahalo is… well… Mahalo. (Jason insists I point out that their education content is doing great. We. Shall. See.)

For good or ill, when Jason offers advice on tech entrepreneurship you want to pay attention.

On a personal level, my friendship with Jason has been many things, but never boring. In my first book, I described our first meeting in London when I responded to his boasts about wealth by secretly charging an entire bar’s open tabs to his Amex. Then there was the time when I drunkenly threw a table at him. Then I got sober, and Jason apparently went nuts, suing Mike Arrington over the TC-AOL sale.

One of the founding principles of PandoDaily was that we’d start with a clean slate, with no inherited feuds (or favors). And in that spirit when I suggested to Sarah that we should try to persuade Jason to write a column for us, she readily agreed, noting that there’s a 50 percent chance this will be the best editorial decision we ever made, and a 50 percent chance it’ll end in litigation, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. One thing it definitely won’t be though: dull.

So here we go. While the column was our idea, the theme of the column “what now for…?” was entirely Jason’s idea, and it’s brilliant. This week, Jason offers some advice to poor old Yahoo.

Jason says…

Thanks Paul, I got it from here (ye damn!).

When Pando asked me to write a column I thought, “Wow, what a great opportunity….. for me to insert myself back into the TechDrama!”

I kid. I kid.

Paul and Sarah are long-time friends, and I’ve always appreciated their prose. What great fun to join them here and face the brutality of the commenters!

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]

T-Mobile has tasked its customers with creating a real-world coverage map that makes it easier to tell where its service works and where it doesn’t. Instead of guessing at where its customers will get service — which is what other carriers do, the company claims — it’s asking people to verify its predictions so it can be more honest with consumers. [Source: T-Mobile]

Amazon isn’t happy that the Federal Aviation Administration wants to restrict how, when, and where it tests the drones it hopes will deliver packages some time in the future. So it’s opened a secret test facility in British Columbia where it can operate without pesky regulators worrying about drones falling out of the sky and hurting bystanders. [Source: The Guardian]

GitHub has been the target of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack over the last few days, perhaps because the Chinese government wants to prevent anti-censorship tools hosted on the service from spreading. The company now says that it’s able to operate despite the attacks, albeit with intermittent outages. [Source: Reuters]